There are plenty of online marketing tools that give businesses an edge today. But businesses should never forego a well mapped out marketing plan.

So first things first…

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for the coming year, quarter or month. Typically, a marketing plan will include:

An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals

A description of your business’s current marketing position

A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed

Key performance indicators you will be tracking

A description of your business’s target market and customer needs

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy. A plan will also help keep you focused on your high-level goals.

Whether you’re a team trying to set smarter marketing goals, a consultant trying to set your client in the right direction, or a one-person team trying to introduce structure, a solid marketing plan shows that your marketing strategies are backed up by research.

But let’s dive into the parts of a marketing plan that every business should have.

How To Create A Marketing Plan: 7 Essential Parts Of A Marketing Plan

Before you start writing and designing, you need to know what the necessary parts of a marketing plan are. There are seven sections that every marketing plan should have.

1. Simple Executive Summary

Starting your marketing plan off on the right foot is important. You want to pull people into your amazing plan for marketing domination. Not bore them to tears.

One of the best ways to get people excited to read your marketing plan is with a well written executive summary. An executive summary introduces readers to your company goals, marketing triumphs, future plans, and other important contextual facts.

Basically, you can use the Executive Summary as a primer for the rest of your marketing plan.

Include things like:

Simple marketing goals

High-level metrics

Important company milestones

Facts about your brand

Employee anecdotes

Future goals & plans

And more

Try to keep your executive summary rather brief and to the point. You aren’t writing a novel, so try to keep it under a three to four of paragraphs.

Take a look at the executive summary in the marketing plan example below:

The executive summary is only two paragraphs long–short but effective.

The executive summary tells readers about the company’s growth, and how they are about to overtake one of their competitors. But there’s no mention of specific metrics or figures–that will be highlighted in the next section of the marketing plan.

An effective executive summary should have enough information to pique the reader’s interest, but not bog them down with specifics yet. That’s what the rest of your marketing plan is for!

The executive summary also sets the tone for your marketing plan. Think about what tone will fit your brand–friendly and humorous? Professional and reliable? Inspiring and visionary?

2. Metric-Driven Marketing Goals

After you perfect your executive summary, it’s time to outline your marketing goals.

(If you’ve never set data-driven goals like this before, it would be worth reading this growth strategy guide)

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so be sure to take your time and to be as clear as possible.

As a rule of thumb, be as specific as possible. Try to set goals that will impact your site traffic, conversions, and customer success–and use real numbers.

But if you don’t want to go into such precise detail, you can stick to basic information, like in this marketing plan example:

Most businesses will have a few different types of target users. That’s why it’s pertinent to identify and create several different user personas. That way, you can better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals, if necessary.

Here’s an example of what your segmented user persona guide could look like:

The important thing is for your team or client to have a clear picture of who their target user is and how they can appeal to their specific problems.

4. Accurate Competitor Research

Next, on the marketing plan checklist, we have the competitor research section. This section will help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you could carve yourself a place alongside them in your niche–and ideally, surpass them.

Competitor research is also incredibly important if you are starting a blog.

Typically, your competitor research should include:

Who their marketing team is

Who their leadership team is

What their marketing strategy is (this will probably revolve some reverse-engineering)

Their yearly growth (you will probably need to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs to do this)

The number of customers they have & their user personas

Also, take as deep a dive as you can into the strategies they use across their:

Blog/Content marketing

Social media marketing

SEO Marketing

Video marketing

And any other marketing tactics they use

Research their strengths and weaknesses in all parts of their company, and you will find some great opportunities. Bookmark has a great guide to different marketing strategies for small businesses, if you need some more information there. .

You can use this simple SWOT analysis worksheet to quickly work through all parts of their strategy as well:

Since you have already done all the research beforehand, adding this information to your marketing plan shouldn’t be that hard.

In this marketing plan example, some high-level research is outlined for 3 competing brands:

But you could take a deeper dive into different facets of your competitors’ strategies. For example, this marketing plan analyses a competitor’s content marketing strategy:

It can also be helpful to divide your competitors into Primary and Secondary groups. For example, Apple’s primary competitor may be Dell for computers, but its secondary competitor could be a company that makes tablets.

Your most dangerous competitors may not even be in the same industry as you. Like the CEO of Netflix said, “Sleep is our competition.”

5. Key Baselines

It’s pretty hard to plan for the future if you don’t know where your business stands right now.

Before we do anything at Venngage, we find the baselines so we can compare future results to something. We do it so much it’s almost like second nature now!

Setting baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. You will also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn’t work, so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help them clearly understand your goals and strategy as well.

Here’s an example of how you can visualize your baselines in your marketing plan:

Another way to include baselines in your plan is with a simple chart, like in the marketing plan example below:

However you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what they need to do. This is not the time to keep your cards close to your chest.

Your marketing strategy section may need to take up a few pages to explain, like in the example below:

With all of this information, even someone from the Dev team would know what the marketing team was working on.

This minimalistic marketing plan example uses color blocks to make the different parts of the strategy easy to scan:

Breaking your strategy down into tasks will make it easier to tackle.

Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a project roadmap. A project roadmap visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks. Our roadmap maker can help you with this.

For example, this project roadmap shows how tasks on both the marketing and web design side run parallel to each other:

Or a mind map, if you want to include a ton of information in a more organized way:

Even a simple “Next, Now, Later” chart can help visualize your strategy:

7. Results Tracking Guidelines

Close your marketing plan with a brief explanation on how you plan to track or measure your results. This will save you a lot of frustration down the line by standardizing how you track results across your team.

Like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how in-depth you want to go. But there need to be some clear guidelines on how to measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At the bare minimum, your results tracking guidelines should specify:

What you plan to track

How you plan to track results

How often you plan to measure

But you can more add tracking guidelines to your marketing plan if you see the need to. You may also want to include a template that your team or client can follow, to ensure that the right metrics are being tracked.

7 Design Tips to Keep in Mind While You Create Your Marketing Plan

While a marketing plan doesn’t necessarily have to be pretty, an impressive design certainly helps if you want your plan to be more convincing.

Presentation is especially important if you’re presenting your marketing plan to investors, or if you need to convince your boss to approve your requested budget.

That’s where a marketing plan template can help. If you don’t have a designer available, or even if you want a framework to base your own design on, a template gives you a solid foundation to work with.

Start creating your marketing plan with a template and then customize the design to fit your information and to incorporate your own branding.

Here are seven marketing plan templates to get your started, along with some report design best practices you should follow when creating your plan.

1. Identify, describe and illustrate your target audience

Knowing your target audience is one of the most fundamental steps that every marketing team should take before making any marketing decisions. So by the time you begin writing your marketing plan, you should have your target audience identified.

In your marketing plan, you should dedicate a section to introducing your target audience.

To help keep your target audience top-of-mind when planning and executing on your marketing strategies, it can be helpful to visualize your audience personas. Faux images of your personas, illustrations and icons are all great ways to put a face to your personas’ “names”.

For example, take this page from a marketing plan:

A photo of “Cassandra Vane”, their “head of marketing” persona, is provided to make the character seem more real. You can incorporate photos seamlessly into your page design by using image frames.

Icons are also used to visualize the different components that make up this persona (their identifies, their demographic information, their goals and their unique challenges).

Take a look at how this page is used in this marketing plan example:

2. Visualize important process flows and strategy roadmaps

To effectively outline new strategies, processes, and timelines, it can be very helpful to visualize the flows.

You could opt for a classic flow chart or a more creative infographic. Whatever type of visual you choose to create, the goal should be to make the information easier for people to follow. Our flow chart maker and process infographic maker can help you with that.

The first step is to organize your flow into distinct steps. Remember to clearly label each step and to use visual cues like lines or arrows to indicate the direction in which the flow should be read.

It can also be helpful to visualize each step using different shapes, or attaching an icon to each step.

For example, this page visualizes an email campaign flow:

Icons represent each email as an individual block, to make it easier for readers to visualize the process. Concise descriptions give readers context to understand the flow chart.

Take a look at how information flows visually throughout this promotional marketing plan template thanks to strategically placed visual cues:

4. Use your main marketing goal to guide your design

One of the main goals of your marketing plan is to identify your high-level marketing goals. Your marketing plan design should be driven by this goal–in your page layouts and in the design elements you use.

You can do this by picking a design motif that reflects your goal and using that throughout your marketing plan. This could be a particular shape or item (for example, using images of plants in an SEO plan to represent growth) or a color scheme that reflects the mood of your mission.

For example, this social media marketing plan identifies their goal as being the go-to source of inspiration and information for runners:

Take a look at how they use chat bubble icons and a bright, bold color scheme to give their marketing plan a friendly and energetic design:

5. Vary your page designs to make your marketing plan engaging

That’s why while you could use the same page layout throughout your whole plan, it’s a good idea to vary your page design. Mixing up your design will prevent your plan from being too predictable. Plus, you will have more flexibility to visualize information creatively.

For example, this SEO plan template simply inverts the color scheme on each page. While the overall color scheme for the whole plan is cohesive, each individual page is varied:

6. Visualize your top channels using charts, icons, and pictograms

It’s important for your team to understand what your highest performing channels. That way, you can identify areas you may want to funnel more resources into.

A simple but effective way to analyze your channels is to visualize them. You can do this using charts, pictograms and infographics.

For example, a pie chart can put into perspective where the bulk of your traffic is coming from:

A stacked bar would also work well to visualize this information.

You can also use icons to emphasize and differentiate between channels, like in this marketing plan slide:

Take a look at how charts, icons and color coding make it easy to scan this marketing agenda presentation for information about specific channels:

7. Use borders or color blocks to organize your pages into sections

Generally, it’s good practice to stick to one topic per page. This will help keep your marketing plan more organized and make it easier for readers to scan for information.

That being said, you may want to put more than one topic on the same page, like if both topics are directly related. In that case, you can organize the page into sections using borders or blocks of background color.

For example, look at how this page is clearly divided into two sections, thanks to the use of a color block background:

Blocks of color are also used to make the sections headers stand out. Take a look at the different pages in this promotional plan template:

A few more marketing plan design best practices:

Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when start designing your marketing plan.

Keep your design elements like fonts, icons and colors consistent

While it’s good to switch up the layout of your pages to keep your marketing plan engaging, it’s important to keep your design consistent. That means:

Using the same font styles for your headers, body text, and accent text (generally, try to stick to only using 2-3 different font styles in one report)

Using the same color scheme throughout your plan, and using the same colors for specific types of information (ex. blue for “social media goals” and green for “SEO goals”)

Using the same style of icons throughout your report, like flat icons, line art icons, or illustrated icons

Download your marketing plan as a PDF

It’s important that your team is on the same page. Sharing your marketing plan via Google Docs or a file sharing service can be unreliable. In most cases, it’s easier to simply download your marketing plan as a PDF and share it with your team that way.

You can download your marketing plan in high-quality PDF or interactive PDF format with Venngage.

Include a table of contents to make it easy to find specific information

This tip is pretty self-explanatory. Even if you’re putting together your marketing plan as a presentation, a simple table of contents at the beginning will give your audience an idea of what they can expect.

Now that you have the basics for designing your own marketing plan, it’s time to get started:

Sara McGuire is a Content Editor at Venngage. When she isn't writing research-driven content, she enjoys reviewing music and hitting up the latest culinary hot spot in her home city of Toronto. Follow her on Twitter @sara_mcguire